Essay

Essay

Mug Shot

The other
day one of the Worldwatch staff gave a talk on global climate change to a small
Green Sanctuary church group. As is usual with these talks, a handful of people
lingered afterwards to offer private comments or questions. The questions are
normally polite creampuffs, and the speaker gets to enjoy the warm glow that
comes from being regarded as an "expert." But this time one question didn't
follow the script. A young woman reproachfully asked the staffer, who had been
sipping from a foam cup of coffee prior to his talk, why he had done such a
horrible thing?

So simple to use a ceramic mug
instead, she chided-especially since he'd brought one, as a visual aid (when
filled with hot liquid, it shows the world's coastlines receding as the polar
icecaps melt).

Ouch.

Face flushing, the staffer mumbled
something about how it's impossible to live a perfect life. Then he rather
smugly pointed out that the questioner's polyester jersey was made from oil.
And naturally most of his brain, as insulted brains do, immediately began
working on a snappier comeback. By the time he got home, it went something
like, "I compost, I recycle, I drive a hybrid gas/electric vehicle-fewer miles
per year than average-I keep the thermostat at 68 in the winter and 78 in the
summer, I have new storm windows and low-flow showerheads, I commute to work by
bike and subway, I send money to pay for tree planting in Central America to
offset my carbon emissions and restore rain forest, and I took a pay cut to work for the environment. And by
the way, your sweater is made from oil, your cotton pants are unsustainable,
your wool socks exploit animals-how can you live with
yourself?"

When the fever passed, however, the
stark truth remained: the questioner had a point. With a little forethought and
effort, the staffer could have used a mug. Failing to do so was one more lost
opportunity to make a small difference in landfill usage and/or greenhouse
gases emitted or toxics released into the atmosphere. Billions of people around
the world have little choice about their lifestyles, but even those of us lucky
enough to have such choices often fail to make the sustainable ones. And those
multitudes of failures, each one so trivial, add up to disaster. By the
eco-footprint meth­odology, humanity exceeded the level of global
sustainability sometime around 1978.

Can we ceramic-mug our way to a
sustainable future? No-but we can't get there without it, either.

"Evolution is pollution," said
economist Kenneth Boulding, one of the spiritual fathers of sustainability. He
meant that all creatures live by using resources and creating wastes. That
hasn't been a problem until relatively recently, because nature's genius has
evolved a system that recycles everything-until now. But today there are so
many people, we use so much stuff, and we've learned to make stuff that nature
has not had time to develop ways of recycling, that humanity has crossed a
critical threshold. We now have to turn around, retrace our steps over that
threshold, and then take a different path-one that keeps our resource use and
waste production within the limits the Earth can handle.

It's an old but difficult lesson.
In A Short History of Progress, historian
Ronald Wright argues that the early settlers of ancient Iraq, who built their
towns and irrigated their fields and eventually destroyed their land via
salination and waterlogging, probably didn't know what they were doing. No one
had ever tried urban living, supported by agriculture, on such a scale before.
But ever since then, most societies that have risen, thrived, declined, and
finally collapsed had fewer excuses. In many cases, at least some members of
those societies knew exactly what was happening, and how things were going
wrong. (Plato, for example, described in detail how goats and deforestation
destroyed the arability of ancient Greek farmlands.) Yet by some failure of
communication within the body politic-like a boxer with a high pain threshold
who doesn't feel the blood running down his face-those cultures seemed helpless
to understand the damage they were suffering, and thus act collectively to
avoid their approaching fates.

Humans haven't changed much in
5,000 years-we're still "only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever, but
seldom wise," Wright says-but now we know better. We have the immense advantage
of the long view, which reveals millennia of repeated blunders. Until now,
those blunders were local. As the saying goes, however, every time history
repeats itself, the price goes up. Wright observes that "the most compelling
reason for reforming our system is that the system is in no one's interest. It
is a suicide machine." That's new: the possibility of global calamity on a
global scale.

So our plight is pretty obvious if
we care to look, and most people reading this essay already know about it. The
question is what to do. One option is to wait for our leaders to wise up and
act. In theory, anyway, they could be persuaded to use the power they wield to
promote sustainability. There is no shortage of policy options. But power, once
held, evidently takes on a logic of its own, even in democracies. Though
wielded in our names, it is often without our consent, sometimes without our
knowledge and contrary to our wishes. Billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, for instance,
are spent every year-and blood is being spilled-to ensure access to the oil
needed for our beloved SUVs and, yes, for our gas/electric hybrids.

In the developed world, which has
both the resources and the chief responsibility for leading the world toward a
sustain­able future, our leaders and institutions are failing us. The U.S.
government is reactionary on environmental issues. Even the environmental
movement itself is pronounced dead. In Europe and Japan, the institutions are
failing too, just more slowly. (The average U.S. citizen's lavish lifestyle is
way over the global sustainable average, those of Europeans and Japanese
somewhat over. Yet it's also obvious that people living in Europe and Japan are
neither deprived nor miserable. Their example shows ours to be hollow, and
points the way toward sustainability.)

But institutions are not the only,
or even the best, engines of change. Institution-led, top-down solutions to the
problem of sustainability seem unlikely. Although no angle should be ignored
and we have to work the problem from all sides, it's wise to be skeptical of
analyses that point to heroic utopian plans. They seem to demand a kind of
metaphorical switch. Before, we're going to hell; flip the switch, and
afterwards there's a transformation, a steady ascent to some utopian summit,
unimpeded by politics-as if the multitudes of people on the planet were an
untapped mass of pliable followers, passively waiting for the right crusade to
join.

Institutions do respond, however
slowly and reluctantly, to popular pressure. If systematic reform does happen,
it might come from the stimulus of a few interest groups backed by a vocal
"majority of the minority that cares." But it might also grow naturally out of
an incremental change of heart by millions resisting the power of compound
disinterest, prodded by a combination of social awareness and conscience. That
would create a vast, steady, irrepressible thrust of millions of lives inching
daily toward the next step. Most of us will never lead such a movement, but we
can help launch one. Where institutions are blind, people must see, and lead
them.

It is
impossible to live a perfect life. But-not to be Pollyanna-ish about
it-it is quite possible to do a bit better today than yesterday. The first step
is simply mindfulness: be aware of the choices. The second step is to make
different choices now and then. Get out of the comfort zone, a little. Feel a
little "burn." (Remember to take the ceramic mug to your next speaking gig.) If
you make a new, more sustainable choice every week or two for a year, then at
the end you've made dozens of such choices-and transformed your life. Do it
long enough, with enough company, and you've transformed the world.